Chapter Text
Reluctantly, he went home.
The ride from the capital back to Gautier territory was a hard one. He had waited for too long, putting off the inevitable. The autumn rains fell and the mountain roads turned to mud.
Coming down one of the steep paths, his horse threw a shoe. He could have exchanged mounts with one of his retainers and made it home by nightfall, but instead he took a room at the closest trading post and waited for the local farrier.
The villagers all made much over him, and Sylvain smiled because what else could he do? What else could any of them do? He was the heir of Margrave Gautier, and he was the only reason that Sreng did not come to raid the storehouses here every winter. These people were as trapped in pretending to love him as he was in accepting their kindness.
They gave him a room with a view of the north.
Mountains loomed around the road, white as teeth, forming a jagged barrier between the cow pastures of Gautier and the frigid wastes of Sreng. Still, Sylvain knew from experience that it could get just as cold up on the high ridges around here. Gautier land was only a few shades less brutal than what lay beyond those peaks.
In the morning, the farrier worked on his horse. Sylvain wandered down the muddy aisle of the stables. A few of the hostlers were talking.
“We’re moving all the herds out of the west pasture tomorrow.”
“Why tomorrow? There’s still time for grazing before the snowfall.”
“Because of the shake. After that, we found sour water in the creek. Cows can’t drink there without getting sick.”
Tremors in the earth weren’t uncommon in the mountains, although they were nothing like what Galatea and Daphnel endured on the borders of Aillel. He had a certain curiosity about those sorts of things—phenomena of the elements or curiosities of nature. As a future Margrave of Gautier, it was technically his duty to oversee the landscape and to take prudent action in the event of trouble.
And, of course, taking a detour out to the western pasture to see the sour water would keep him away and occupied for another day.
When the shepherds led him out onto the slopes, Sylvain noticed that they carried charms to Saint Seiros around their necks. It made little sense to him. Wolves and bandits cared nothing for such trinkets, and what else was there to endanger them up in the mountains?
It was just a creek. Just a few rocks stained dark and slick. Just a sheen on the water, iridescent and almost beautiful as the sunlight hit it. Nothing that could harm them.
Sylvain knelt down and trailed his fingers in the water. They came out slippery, smelling of something acrid, almost rotten. After five years of war, he had seen and touched and immersed himself in much worse.
He needed to go home. His mother’s letters had made that abundantly clear. He ought to hurry.
So he took his time with the water, with the rocks, with the inky black residue that could glimmer so beautifully, and with the sweet perfume of brimstone.
—
The first letter from his mother had been a simple inquiry: the war is over. When will you return home?
The second letter was more subtly demanding: the war is over. There is much work to do here. We have sent our soldiers away for five years, and many have not returned. When will you come to assist us?
The third letter resorted to the most devastating weapon his mother possessed—truth.
His father had caught a summer cold that lingered on in his chest. For reasons that the priests could not explain, he was not regaining his strength. Sreng would learn of it soon enough and Sylvain possessed the only other pair of hands in the world capable of wielding the Lance of Ruin and securing the northern border.
And so Sylvain rode home, away from friends and purpose and the new man he had started to believe he could be. The Lance of Ruin trembled in his fingers when the ramparts came into sight, straining like a hunting hound about to be set upon its prey. He relaxed his grip, and tried to focus on something else.
It would be a bad winter. But when spring came, his father would recover and he could leave the family relic here and return to Fhirdiad. He would ask Dimitri to open negotiations with Sreng and he would work harder than he ever had before in his life to ensure that he was never again trapped here, in Gautier, all alone.
The northern Castle Gautier crouched atop a slope, heavily fortified and ringed with walls and gates. The lands around it were speckled with shaggy cattle and the occasional homestead poking out of the endless expanse of yellowish grass. Not many people were willing to live outside of the castle’s defenses. Unlike the southern residence, the town here more closely resembled a military encampment.
The castle itself was stark, neat, and impeccably kept. To someone else, it might have even seemed welcoming. Blanche Gautier was known for her ability to balance elegance with simplicity. Embroidered lace curtains from Enbarr or brightly dyed Derdriu tapestries would have only served to draw attention to the poverty of the countryside. Better that the Margrave’s manor be unadorned and humble.
It was an impressive building, large and spacious in its proportions. The design was attributed to the ever-pragmatic Laetitia Gautier herself.
Sylvain knew that it was only reasonable to make the walls thick and windowless, holding in the heat even on the coldest nights.
But, he thought as he stepped into the familiar entrance hall for the first time in many moons, it did mean that the house always seemed so dark.
“Sylvain, you’re two weeks later than we expected,” his mother greeted him as soon as his cloak and gloves were off.
Blanche Gautier was a small woman, her delicate stature a mark of Duvall ancestry. A southerner, by Faerghus standards, she was perpetually wrapped in thick, dark wool. As sepulchral as the house itself, Sylvain thought sometimes, when he was in one of his crueler moods.
His mother had always preferred to spend her winters at the southern residence, but it seemed that duty had forced her up here for the season. It was no wonder, then, that she was so irritated by his lateness.
“The capital needed me for longer,” Sylvain shrugged lightly. “But I made it before the first snow, so no harm done.”
“The border defenses are getting worse. You haven’t been here to see it. The war has made Sreng bold, and we barely have enough soldiers to line the castle walls,” his mother fretted, moving to examine the lance, which he had left wrapped up with his other baggage.
Sylvain felt a sour burn beginning in the back of his throat. Of course, she went to the relic first. His mother had always been a very practical woman.
But he forced those bitter thoughts away. It was unfair to treat her that way. She was frightened, that was all. A Faerghus Margravine could never admit as much, and that made her seem callous.
“It will be better now that the war is over,” Sylvain promised her, reaching out and lightly squeezing her hand. “Dimitri will make peace with Sreng and I have a few ideas for our defenses that should ensure everyone sleeps soundly in Gautier.”
His mother stopped fussing over the lance and looked up at him. She smiled and placed one of her little palms over the top of his fingers.
“Such a general you have grown up to be,” she remarked. “How could anyone have doubted? It is in your blood.”
Sylvain resisted the urge to flinch.
His mother could be a cold woman. She certainly had always been to his father. While they were perfectly suited to run a territory together, Blanche and Matthais Gautier had openly, icily loathed one another since the day that his birth meant they no longer needed to pretend otherwise. The only other person he had ever seen her truly care for had been…
Well. He was gone now.
Perhaps that was why even in her brief moments of tenderness, doubt always lingered at the back of his mind. Was she proud of him? Or did a part of her still blame him? Was she merely beaming up at his Crest, his body just the shell for some many-tendriled thing lurking within his veins?
“I should go speak with father,” Sylvain said, pulling his hand away.
“He’s resting right now, I’m afraid. You’ll have to wait until dinner,” his mother replied.
That was the moment when it finally sank in. His father had never taken an afternoon to rest a day in his life before this.
Sylvain would not be riding back to Fhirdiad in the spring.
—
Margrave Gautier did not appear particularly unwell at dinner. He sat upright, ate tasteless chicken baked in cream sauce, and only occasionally cleared his throat with a sticky, unpleasant sound. His mind seemed sharp and he talked solemnly of storehouses and repairs to the bridges and training drills for their dwindling battalion of mages.
As the Ethereal Moon rose and the snow started to fall, Margrave Gautier had a bad fall from his horse. There was no serious injury, aside from a few bruises, but it left the servants shaken. No one could remember a time when the great Wall of Ice had lost his balance in the saddle.
Once the frost was thick and settled in Guardian Moon, Margrave Gautier developed a deep cough that shook his chest so violently that each fit was followed by a sharp, sucking wheeze.
Yet, the Margrave insisted that he was still capable of running his territory and gave Sylvain nothing but a disgusted grimace when he dared to suggest taking over some of the responsibility. No raiding parties crossed the Ruska mountains when the snow was heavy, and so Sylvain was left to stir around the castle, waiting with baited breath for any sign of pegasus post.
Nothing came. Probably the winter storms made it too dangerous even to fly. It was not terribly unusual up in Gautier lands. Besides, Dimitri had bigger things to worry about. Felix had Dimitri to worry about.
Ingrid had… Ingrid had gone home to Galatea, to a situation not entirely unlike his own. He would have thought that she might, at least, be bored enough to pen a few lines.
It was the storms, he decided. No letter was worth trying to fly through these storms.
Instead, Sylvain began to fill his hours working on a project he had played around with during the war. Back then, it had felt like a distant fantasy, but now that he had ample time and a fierce need for distraction, his vague concepts became equations, which became glyphs, which became schematic diagrams.
There were plenty of mages in the world more talented and clever than him. Annette seemed to have read nearly every book on magical theorems ever written, and Mercedes, while clearly a prodigy in healing, was disarmingly powerful and nearly instinctive with reason as well. Even Felix was quicker than he would admit with memorizing thunder spells.
However, none of them shared Sylvain’s interest in practical applications. A perfectly executed ragnarok was all very well and good, but what if it could be cast farther, faster, and by someone who had not spent years studying at an elite institution? Generals often complained about the inaccuracy and relative expense of equipping a position with fire orbs, when mages were far more useful fighting with the infantry, but what if the devices could be better? What if anyone could use one, not a mage, but a farmer or a scribe or a miller? What if the design was streamlined, sacrificing range for power and ease?
What began as a few sketches to fill his empty hours turned into a feverish obsession. Still, it felt good to be working and making something that would be useful, that might even be able to change the way wars were fought.
In the back of his mind, a thought lingered, too desperate to ever be voiced. Yet, it was there, tugging and itching and spurring him onwards.
This could be how he saved himself, and every unborn child that he had always dreaded, from a living death up here, imprisoned at the edge of the world.
When he was a child, they had always passed the winters playing games.
People found that strange to imagine: the somber, serious Margrave Gautier frittering his time away over chessmen or backgammon or nine men’s morris. Every evening after dinner, Sylvain recalled his father calling him into his study to pour over the wooden board for a few hours. He did the same with Miklan, and even the same with Leif, the boy who lingered on the threshold of their family. Sometimes, his father would let them play against one another, allowing each boy a rare chance to win.
As the oldest, Miklan usually outsmarted them, while Sylvain and Leif were more evenly matched. Leif hated to talk to either of them normally. Sylvain was never sure if it was a strange captive’s pride, or if the boy simply did not like the way he still stumbled over Fódlan words. But when they played at the gameboard, Leif could be as shrewd and strategic as any good Gautier boy.
On those silent, tense winter’s nights, it had been possible for all of them to confront one another with something approaching honesty. When it was only wooden pieces, all of the unspoken competition, hostility, and calculated savagery could be expressed without fear of punishment. And eventually, even Sylvain, youngest, smallest, could find a way to win.
He remembered the first time that he had tricked his father into a checkmate at about fourteen years old. It had been one of the happiest nights of his life. Now that he looked back on it, doubt crept into the memory. Had it ever been a true victory, or simply another move in a longer game, a gambit to ensure that Sylvain would keep playing, to prevent him from throwing the board and scattering the pieces as Miklan had done?
The winter nights were longer without the chess board, and so he invented his own games on paper, sketching out futures without anyone to force him back, to trap him with his own desire, to bait him into all the wrong moves.
He sent a courier on the wing to Fhirdiad by the end of Pegasus Moon, and, at last, he received a response. The documents had been passed along to the most skilled magic artificers in the Kingdom, and, Sylvain saw with a pang of relief deeper than he expected, the King would make a visit to Gautier territory as soon as the snows melted in order to personally survey the border defenses.
For those final remaining weeks, Sylvain found himself spending most of his days tramping through the lands around the castle, under the guise of conducting a topographical survey. Without the distraction of lines, angles, and equations, he found the house oppressive. Time hardly seemed to pass in those windowless halls, and he could not tell if he was imaging the fact that the echoing sound of his father coughing was growing more and more frequent.
While in Fhirdiad, he might have passed the time with a few brief romances, all of the eligible contenders up here knew him too well. As a boy, he had methodically charmed them and then broken their hearts. And, if he invited them out on an evening stroll or an afternoon picnic now, they would remember how shamefully he had mistreated them.
They would still say yes. That was what frightened him the most. The majority would still accept.
So he walked the fields around Gautier castle alone, idly pretending that he was picking out spots for possible palisades or watchtowers. As the snows melted, the yellow grass reemerged. The soil was thin here, and bare rock often showed at the tops of hillocks or along the edges of small ravines.
Sylvain spent many hours tracing the stones with his fingers. He had seen rocks like this before along the Fraldarius coast, but it made no sense all the way up here in the highlands. The outlines of shells were impressed into the crumbling limestone, and yet the sea could never have touched these mountains.
“The Goddess’ Despair,” one of the castle scribes informed him when he asked about the geology of the frontier lands. “In retaliation for the arrogance of mankind, Sothis flooded the entire world and then gave it life anew.”
“Funny,” Sylvain remarked lightly. “I’d always heard she was more partial to fire, as far as punishments were concerned.”
He circled one place on the maps in his family's library. Pitchsand Vale, only a league north of Castle Gautier.
On the morning that King Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd and his entourage arrived, the Margrave rose early and had squires ready his armor. He stood to greet the King in full military regalia. Sylvain waited silently beside him, listening to the faint noise of labored breathing that belied his father’s formidable stance. His mother had ordered the kitchens to prepare veal for the royal visit, and the house smelled of succulent, innocent flesh.
But the moment that Dimitri arrived, so gloriously restored, and Felix beside him, determined despite everything that the war had taken from him, Sylvain felt his shoulders unclench. If Ingrid had just been there with them, he could have pretended that it could stay like this, and that the promises they had sworn as children would always be honored.
Her absence, however, made the stark reality of their situation uncomfortably apparent, in the same way as his father’s quiet, steady wheezing.
Dimitri walked the castle ramparts with him after dinner, Felix and the Margrave being occupied in the parlor, hashing out some form of thorny inheritance claim regarding a tiny sliver of land between Gautier and Fraldarius.
“Those lights along the ridge,” Dimitri pointed out as they paused at one corner of the keep, “what are they?”
“Watch towers,” Sylvain said. “They light a beacon every night to confirm that no raiders from Sreng are sneaking up on the castle town.”
“A clever system,” Dimitri remarked. “It reminds me of that spyglass your father once purchased from those Almyran traders at the capital. A way to see the whole of a territory from one central point. The one that we, um, rather incautiously encouraged you to take apart to determine how it worked.”
“Yeah, well, the fire was probably the simpler method,” Sylvain laughed, shrugging his shoulders against the cold. “I can’t believe you remembered that. My father never let me touch anything in his study again and my mother started locking up the library doors at night."
“The folly of youth,” Dimitri smiled. “As a boy, I was so fearful of my own strength, I couldn’t fathom how anyone could break a device without even cracking the glass lens.”
“Guess all my flair for destruction is pretty unfathomable. Gives me that air of mystery.”
“I hope you know, Sylvain, how deeply impressed the scholars in Fhirdiad were with your work on the fire orbs,” Dimitri told him as he turned to look out over the moonlit fields, the last patches of snow forming islands of shimmering white in the darkness.
“Hey, I’m not doing much else up here,” he shrugged, hiding his genuine grin behind a superfluous wink. “Just don’t raise those expectations too high, okay?”
“I shall continue to have them exceeded then,” Dimitri smiled back. “The royal sorcery engineers tell me they hope to have prototypes ready by the start of the new year. Perhaps that will be a relief to you. Your father tells me that small parties from Sreng have been hunting near the border, likely scouting for a larger invasion.”
“An invasion that I intend to stop before it begins,” Sylvain said firmly.
“Perhaps,” Dimitri sighed and then smiled apologetically. “I know I have been… less than I promised you, when it comes to repairing our relationship with Sreng. It seems that all of my time and treasury is still monopolized by the damage of the war. The desolation in the west, years of failed harvests in the former Empire, and Dedue up in Duscur, trying to set right so many wrongs…”
Dimitri’s words faded away and he turned to look at Sylvain. There was a bone-deep weariness in his gaze, hidden behind that regal demeanor. It made Sylvain unexpectedly remember the boy from long ago—the sweetly anxious kid who Sylvain always had to coax into relaxing whenever he broke even the smallest rule. The two years between them suddenly felt like they mattered again.
“You worry about fixing Fódlan, Your Majesty,” Sylvain reminded him. “I can handle Sreng. Once we let them see the fire orbs, I’m pretty sure it will be all peace and quiet up here.”
“Let us hope,” Dimitri nodded. “Once the first prototype is complete, I will have another crafted immediately. Why, we may even be able to produce six or seven of these weapons eventually!”
“Or seven?”
Something stuck in his throat. He cleared it.
“In a few more years,” Dimitri said earnestly. “Especially if I can manage to negotiate a new tariff with Morfis. The arcane crystals they refine there could help us craft enough fire orbs to at least cover the city walls.”
“Oh,” Sylvain whispered. He cleared his throat again. “That’s… great. Arcane crystal is pricey, I guess.”
Doors had a habit of snapping shut, right at the moment when he thought he was about to slip through.
Dimitri was still talking, apparently oblivious to the cage that he was dropping over Sylvain’s head with every word. He looked so kind, radiating such gentle concern.
The bastard. He wasn’t some little kid anymore, he was Dimitri . Sylvain had wasted five years searching the wilderness for him, and then followed him into battles where he couldn’t even be bothered to command his troops. How many hundreds of people had died following him, charging to their deaths? Now he had the gall to pretend that he was gentle, when Sylvain had seen him, Sylvain knew him, they weren’t really so different at all, and Sylvain knew that.
As if Dimitri ever thought of him as a friend, worthy of genuine praise. Sylvain was nothing but a tool to be placated and flattered, a weapon to be maintained, an ugly, skeletal lance to point north and…
And he just wouldn’t stop talking.
Dimitri rattled off plans and ledgers, and Sylvain had to sit there and take it, chew and swallow, say thank you, Your Majesty, for this wonderful, terminal prison.
“In the end, I believe the investment will be more than worth it. If we can buy another year or two of peace with Sreng—
“Oi, boar, what are you doing wandering around up here? It’s freezing.”
Felix’s voice interrupted them before Dimitri could continue. He had materialized out of the darkness in a flurry of sharp, efficient movement. As he approached, he gave Sylvain a brief, dissatisfied grimace.
“Taking in a bit of the evening air will not harm me, Felix—”
“Get downstairs. Blanche Gautier will have a fit if you don’t go drink a glass of hot mead and go to bed.”
“I meant no offense—”
“Start walking.”
On the stairs back down to the house, Felix took Sylvain by the arm for a second and pulled him aside. Sylvain braced for a diatribe. The disappointment had put him in a foul mood, but he couldn't let Felix get under his skin. Swallow down the resentment, he thought firmly, and remember that this is your friend, and you don't need to destroy this too.
However, Felix appeared more concerned than annoyed when he opened his mouth.
“You need to be careful with him,” Felix muttered. “He’s more fragile than he seems right now. It’s been… difficult in Fhirdiad.”
“I’m always careful,” Sylvain replied automatically, forcing a vacant grin across his face.
Felix gripped his sleeve a fraction tighter. Of course. Why had Sylvain expected anything different?
It had always been the two of them: Dimitri and Felix, Felix and Dimitri. Even when they hated each other, they couldn’t keep one another’s names out of their mouths. Since they were kids, Sylvain had always been an interloper, another irrelevant side-character, a brief clownish interlude in the grand destiny of King and Shield.
“He tortures himself over every problem he cannot solve,” Felix said, eyes darting to where Dimitri was hopefully on his way to rest. “And Sreng is one problem we both know cannot be easily solved.”
Sylvain nodded. He felt light. He felt empty. There was no solution. There was no escape.
“Oh,” Felix started to leave, but then seemed to remember something and turned back. “You haven’t heard from Ingrid at all, have you?”
“Not in a while,” Sylvain replied. “Not since Fhirdiad.”
“You ought to write,” Felix instructed him. “She’s probably bored out of her mind in Galatea.”
—
By Lone Moon, Margrave Gautier could no longer climb the stairs to his bedchamber without leaning upon Sylvain’s arm.
Felix sent a note with a pegasus courier. It was characteristically brusque.
Sylvain— Fire orb prototype worked perfectly. How is your family?
A few weeks later, Margrave Gautier woke with blood staining his pillowcases. The same courier returned, bearing an equally taciturn note.
Sylvain— Answer my letters.
The new year dawned beautifully, sweet and tender, green and hazy. Sylvain hardly noticed it.
Sylvain paid no attention to the calves in the pastures or the meadows of blooming heather or the snowmelt rivers that glistened in the valleys. He was too busy to notice, or to respond to letters, or to listen to his parents fighting through the walls, his father’s voice hoarse and croaking.
Since the moment that Dimitri departed, Sylvain had buried himself in the Gautier library, pouring over every book he could find on arcane crystals, on Morfis, on foreign military tactics, and finally, out of sheer desperation, on Dagda.
One story held the key, as it turned out. The journal of an Adrestian sailor, who had been present for the Empire’s ill-advised attempt at invasion. The sea had caught fire, he wrote, his words tinged with hysteria and terror. The sea had burned, and the ships had been consumed, and no one could put it out.
The air smelled foul, like rotten eggs, like brimstone, like the fires of Ailell, he claimed. And the waters of the Dagdan coast had been strange, covered in pearlescent rainbows.
The cleric who had recorded the sailor’s testimony had written there in the margins: the burning of black water is forbidden by the Church of Seiros.
Well, if black water could do that, then Sylvain would just have to be damned. One way or the other, he was prepared to burn.
—
When he returned from Pitchsand Vale, the bottom of his boots were black. The valley had smelled of sulfur and the scent lingered in his hair, on his hands, under his nails where the sticky tar still clung.
There was a jar of it in his saddlebag. So much of the substance was welling up from the ground there that it had not been hard to collect. It wasn’t actually much like water, more like a liquid rock. He had not brought a trowel, so he had pulled off his gloves and used his bare hands, letting the dark, foul substance stain his skin.
Something about the texture of it felt familiar. Sticky black, pulling apart in thick threads, dripping through his fingers like the saliva of an animal. It enveloped the pale flesh of his palms, viscous enough that it felt like his hand might be sealed away inside of it forever, like it might eat him alive.
Like one day, he would also be swallowed into the oily darkness, and emerge as a monster.
As his horse reached the gates, Sylvain looked up to see white wings above him.
Another letter from Felix, he thought with exasperation, except… no. There was an entire battalion of falcon knights soaring over Castle Gautier.
And they wore the green and gold livery of House Galatea.